An Eraser For Graffiti

May 31, 1985

A news photo the other day was truly heartwarming. It showed two 13-year- old boys in a North Side alley, busy painting out graffiti they had put on a garage door. It was a scene one would never tire of watching.

Police had caught these two youngsters, along with two others, smearing their names in shoe polish on the windows and seats of a CTA train. The boys clearly regarded this as a normal pastime and were taken aback that anyone would report it to police. ``Somebody told,`` said one, aggrieved. ``They even stopped the train so they could catch us.``

Let us pause here for prolonged applause. The passengers who reported them and the police who acted promptly have given Chicagoans new hope. It seems there is a way to contain the tide of graffiti before it swamps us.

The new element is a change in the Illinois juvenile code, effective this month. Minors arrested for defacing property may now be given an option: They can go to Juvenile Court or, with their parents` consent, they can choose public service in the neighborhood where they were arrested. The most appropriate service is to help clean up the mess they made, and community groups in the victimized neighborhoods are glad to provide the tools.

This is still far short of a solution. As neighborhood residents and CTA riders know, the graffiti plague has been worsening. For youth gangs in particular, defacing property has become a way to claim turf and assert

``power,`` if only the power to make other people clean up after them. Youngsters who are not gang members seem to see graffiti as a healthy form of self-expression and even expect admiration for their work. (Said one of the unwilling clean-up team: ``Gang stuff is just graffiti. What we do is art.``) This form of civic measles can be serious; New York has been pretty well disabled by it. Catching a few of the defacers may not halt the epidemic. But the more Chicagoans join in controlling graffiti, the more youths will learn a healthy lesson: They are not free to turn their city into a slum, and self-expression isn`t as much fun when you have to clean it up yourself.